Online Worlds Roundtable #1, Part 1

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We ask a panel of distinguished online developers for their thoughts on reaching casual gamers and the mass market.

By Richard Aihoshi - 'Jonric'

In September of 1997, after at least a year and a half of publicity build-up, the commercial release of Ultima Online ushered in a new age of computer gaming. Contrary to what some might believe, it was not the first title in the category now loosely called online worlds. For example, Meridian 59 launched the year before, as did Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds, and in 1991, a full half decade before that, there was the original Neverwinter Nights. What made Ultima Online a landmark is the fact that it caught the attention of the gaming audience to an extent far beyond these or any other of its predecessors. Despite wildly varying reviews, rather steep hardware requirements and a lengthy learning curve, it quickly became a hit, building a community that remains strong and active to this day.

This success led to tremendous hype. As a group, online worlds have yet to attain the immense popularity predicted for them. In part, this can be attributed to their long development cycles and the resulting small number of releases each year. More to the point however, they tend to have rather limited appeal outside of relatively serious gamers. Nonetheless, cause for optimism does exist. The design community is very aware that for the category to achieve its growth potential, it must start attracting "casual gamers" and work towards becoming more of a "mass market" product. Of course, how quickly this will happen is open to question, as is the extent to which it's possible at all. To kick off a new feature series, we invited some of our online developer friends and acquaintances to express their feelings on the topic.

Topic Over the past few years, we've seen a lot of talk about the potential of online worlds to attract millions of players including the hazily defined "casual gamers" and the even more vague "mass market". Within a reasonable time frame, to what extent do you regard this as being achievable? What do you see as the keys to the online world category as a whole achieving its full potential in terms of reaching the largest possible audience, and what do you regard as the major barriers to be overcome?

Gordon Walton Vice President, Maxis Executive Producer, The Sims Online Well, since I'm working on The Sims Online, I certainly believe we can reach a much more casual gaming audience. The vast majority of the players of The Sims have been a completely non-traditional gaming audience. They are more than half female, and tend to be younger than the normal PC gaming audience. At the same time, they cover the entire spectrum of ages even with a concentration in the 15 to 26 crowd. Many of them only play The Sims, as other games simply don't appeal to them.

It is certainly possible, and I believe probable, that will see over a million players trying online games for the first time in 2003 in North America. If one of the offerings achieves the nirvana of online offerings, namely "viral communicability", then we could see this number get much bigger quite quickly.

The key elements to make an online world work for millions of people are these:

1) Accessibility - This covers a lot of ground, game topic accessibility, system requirements, ease of use/play/learning curve, short play session capability, multi-platform accessibility and more.

2) Viral sampling - Players can share the experience with friends and the friends can sample the online environment with an email-sized attachment.

3) Custom Content - Players must be able to contribute to and modify the world. They must be able to leave their mark to truly "own" their place in the world/society.

4) Socialization and Rites of Passage - This must be a seamless part of the game experience. No existing product does a good job of socializing incoming players, and very few have well designed rites of passage built in. Many of the problems with have with online player behavior stem from our design shortcomings in this area.

5) Utility-level availability - The Internet is not very reliable and neither are the games we run on them. To attract and keep millions of players, the games will have to work as well as electricity or the phone. Average people are not going to mix well with "technical problems".

Richard Garriott Executive Producer NCsoft Corporation I strongly believe that online entertainment can and will succeed here in the US, as it already has in Korea. In Korea alone, our product Lineage has about 2.5 million players in a country of about 50 million people. That means about 1 in 20 people in the country play Lineage. While there are special circumstances as to how Lineage has become so vastly popular, it still shows how popular online gaming can become.

Unfortunately, here in the US, we have two major obstacles to creating massively successful online games. First and foremost is the game design itself. I believe many of the largest developers are shooting far off the mark, and their failures will stifle the 'mass' market for some time. I do not yet see a product in development with the right combination of easy to understand concept, simple game play, compelling attractive visuals, and diversity and depth of experience to catch and keep the attention of a 'mass' audience. Many current developers are either re-treading standard RPG metaphors or building elaborate but non-compelling glorified chat environments.

The second issue is market acceptance. While consumers are happy to pay a premium on their home cable TV bill for rarely used specialty channels, the same is not yet true for online services. People have only one cable service provider and premium services come attached to your one bill. Buying subscription services ad hoc from individual and diverse companies remains a notable barrier, especially after already making a substantial investment at retail for a product in the first place.

Still, I believe the right 'casual gamer' 'mass market' 'killer app' does exist. I have heard great ideas from within our halls and from a few of our esteemed colleagues and competitors in this endeavor. The best shots will come from developers that play with everything from design and delivery through billing methods. It's my hope that some of us build them before the 'mass' public gives up on online due to some of the early over-marketed underperformers.

In the mean time, I still believe the 'hard core' gamer market is far from tapped. Great RPG-style virtual world games can still reach millions of players in the next few years!